"Ben, I can’t talk very long because Mother’s waiting."

     "I’m sorry. But I have the lab to myself today. I thought we could really talk."

     "I’m sorry, Ben."

     "Thanks for the lovely present. You put so much into it."

     "Thank you, too, Ben. I’m sorry. I really can’t talk."

     "When are you coming back?"

     "The late Delta flight on Saturday, the fourth of January. But you don’t have to meet it."

     "But I want to."

     "Ben, I have to go."

     Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. "Ben, this is Alice. How’d you like to do the South Beach with us on New Year’s Eve."

     "I don’t know, Alice. It’s just — "

     "You haven’t made any other plans."

     "No."

     "And you probably won’t, either," she said with irrefutable certainty. "We’ll pick you up in front of the Grove General Store at nine."

     What could I say? At nine o’clock New Year’s Eve I was waiting in front of Coconut Grove’s foremost convenience store. Two minutes later Alice drove up. We picked up another couple, a woman she worked with and her husband. In their presence, Alice acted like we had a long-term relationship based on deep-running sophisticated familiarity. I went along with her on it. I did my best to be charming, but memories welled up as we crossed the MacArthur Causeway and skirted Government Cut where I’d first shown Rebecca the cruise ships. An hour later we were bar hopping as a foursome, standing in noisy crowds listening to noisy music. Alice had no news on Dr. Westley’s plight. Her head found my shoulder a number of times.

     The witching hour found the four of us strolling barefoot in the sand within a hundred yards of where Rebecca and I had shared our first long kiss. Signal flares from the yachts off shore made a nice, impromptu fireworks display. Alice kissed me on the lips. I answered with a whispered message that she accepted intellectually, but not emotionally. Around two o’clock in the morning, Alice stood on my landing and watched me row off.

     Tom Clancy helped me through the next two days, and lab work got me through the third. When I arrived on the fourth of January, McGregor handed me a message from Rebecca:

Something has come up.

Delta Number 935.

Sunday, 11:30 p.m.

     That Sunday was the longest day of my life, and then the flight was delayed for half an hour. Waiting anxiously at the entrance of the Concourse C, I finally identified the first New York passengers. Rebecca walked in the middle of the stream, looking tired, upset and small. I waved and smiled. She quickened her pace, looking at me carefully as if to read my face. With each hurried step, her expression became less worried. She grasped my arms and kissed me lightly on the lips. I started to throw my arms around her, ready to declare my love like an Italian tenor. But Rebecca took one step back and held me at arms length.

     "You have to be very nice to me for a long, long time, Mr. Ben Candidi. I just broke off my engagement because of you."

     My mouth dropped open and my brain whirled.

     "Rebecca," I cried out. "I love you! You won’t be sorry. I’ve never met anyone like you before. You’re my fifteen. We’ll be like two molecules with a dissociation constant of ten to the negative fifteen power — as tight as two molecules can get. We won’t dissociate for a lifetime!"

     My biophysical declaration of love brought a big smile to her face, but just as quickly she became serious. She started to say something but it came out as a sob. She threw her arms around me and buried her face in my neck.

     "Oh, Ben," she whispered. "It was so hard for me, and I was afraid you might have a change of heart over Christmas. I had been together with him for three years. We have been engaged for the last year. He’s going to be a lawyer. He’s very self-centered and proud. He’s not subtle and considerate like you. After you, I knew that I really didn’t love him."

     "Rebecca, I knew it had to be something like this."

     "Oh, Ben, I had so much to resolve. Sometimes I didn’t think that I had the strength for it. He tried to use his love for me as a hook. It was like he tried to handcuff us together. And he tried to argue me back to him. Dad took his side and Mom tried to arbitrate. They all wanted to know about you. They used the guilt thing on me. I was destroying four thousand years of tradition. What kind of grandchildren would I give them? Then Mother started telling me about how Dad is getting sick, and he may not live too many years more."

     Magically, our embrace wasn’t disturbed by worldly problems such as walking in airport crowds, retrieving baggage, hailing taxis and opening the door of Rebecca’s apartment. Our embrace continued through a long night, when time was marked by whispered endearments and declarations of love, flooding and ebbing in streams of shared consciousness and tears of joy, interspersed with whispered dreams of a shared future, dissolving into sleep just before dawn.

     We ate a hasty breakfast and walked together to Rebecca’s lecture. With her classmates filing into the amphitheater, Rebecca kissed me a passionate goodbye and danced up the three steps to the entrance.

     I had an important errand to do before going to the lab. In the hospital gift shop, I selected a card with an appropriate text — "SORRY" in big letters.

     I addressed the envelope to Alice, care of the Miami Standard and wrote:

     That evening, Rebecca and I worked it all out. An answering machine would screen my calls, avoiding further conflict with her mom and dad. I would stay overnight at her apartment as often as possible. Her roommate would be giving up the apartment in June, and maybe then I could move in for good. I would use Monday and Wednesday nights for Westley, for my instrument maintenance job at the M.E. and for the boat. I told Rebecca about my social relationship with Westley, but nothing about the detective work.

     At dinner, I told the Old Man and Margaret about the Christmas service at Plymouth Congregational and how beautifully the choir had sung.

     "Oh yes, the ‘Nativity Carol’ by John Rutter!" exclaimed the Old Man. "The piece is destined to become an old chestnut. Fine young chap. Nice voicings he wrote, and he is also quite an organist . . . secure place in liturgical music and a fine future, although he did dabble a little too much for my taste in commercial endeavours."

     Margaret said they had attended Christmas Eve services at Trinity Cathedral (Episcopal). To round out the conversation, I offered some bland details on the Mensa party.

     After dinner, we "removed" to the study. Westley flipped the wall switch and the floor lamp illuminated the oddly furnished room. A second later his old tape recorder started squeaking like it was going to pop a drive belt. He must have thought himself clever, plugging the relic into the floor lamp socket.

     "Yes, it is still a bit nippy out there," I said laughingly. The needles on the yellow backlit input meters registered my voice, and "pegged" with my laugh. The tape stretched badly at the start, but did not break. Slowly the large spools on the ancient device settled into coordinated motion.

     "Yes, yes. Quite nippy! Please do make yourself comfortable. Yes!"

     In double entendre code, I told the Old Man about Ledbetter’s European patent application and that I’d ordered it.

     "This is most interesting, Benjamin. The possibilities that one has in this Information Age! And just in a nick of time, for I am once again under severe pressure to produce some usable evidence."

     I told him what I’d learned from Alice McRae.

     "Oh, Ben, that is but half of it. My enemies on the Commission are forming a subcommittee, and they will probably use all of their pernicious backbiting tricks. The trouble is that they can talk about this Cooper thing among themselves as if it were real, but I cannot answer them before I have the facts."

     "We should have a rudimentary theory in a few weeks," I said.

     I put the slip of paper with the patent-ordering information on the side table near my glass. Under white bushy eyebrows, Westley’s eyes followed the paper to its resting place like the eyes of an Old English sheepdog might follow a straying ewe.

     "Dr. Westley, I hate to eat and run, but I have to complete a problem set for my Molecular Genetics course."

     "No, I quite understand. If keeping us company is making too many demands on your time we could — "

     "You shouldn’t put it that way. Could I just call to check in with you once a week?"

     "Most assuredly." He picked up the slip of paper and saw me out of the room.

     Molecular Genetics, Cell Biology and Cardiovascular Pharmacology did keep me very busy. So did my follow-up experiments for Rob McGregor. D-day came four weeks after that dinner with Westley. When I opened my Coconut Grove Post Office box and saw a German air mail envelope, I ripped it open, pulled out the patent, sat down on the lobby floor and read it. "Improved drug delivery using selectin glycoproteins" stated the title.

     I didn’t need to go past the abstract to know I’d struck pay dirt. It described "a method for oral delivery of proteins and other gastrically and cellularly degradable drugs or biological substances." Protein-containing micro-particles were coated with intestinal lymphocyte selectins which guide the proteins across the intestine and into the bloodstream. The selectin-coated particles were enterically coated to protect them from digestive enzymes while they pass through the stomach.

     The abstract stated that the invention allows a patient to take insulin by mouth, eliminating the need for painful injections.

     "Or encapsulate a protein toxin," I said out loud, "and sprinkle it on your enemy’s food!"

     I stood up and paced the lobby. My first inclination was go right over to Westley and show it to him. But it would be better to keep up our game of innocence so that I would not have to lie under oath. I called the Old Man at his residence.

     "Dr. Westley, I’ve received an important publication in the mail. It’s really worth evaluating."

     "How good is it?"

     "The situation reminds me of a cartoon I saw in the New Yorker a while back. You know the New Yorker, don’t you?" I couldn’t resist tantalizing the old windbag.

     "New Yorker? Why yes, of course, although it does not compare with . . . Well, what was in this cartoon? Can you get on with it?"

     "One scientist was standing over another scientist who was looking into a microscope. The second scientist says to the first: ‘I think I may have a possible Eureka. (!!)’"

     "Well . . ."

     "Well, you know how scientists are so tentative and cautious."

     There was a long pause. Westley obviously didn’t appreciate my humor. "Would you like to tell me about it?" When I said "no," he wheedled and whined. I reminded him we were having dinner together the next evening.

     Aboard the Diogenes, sipping after-dinner tea, I studied the patent application thoroughly. It had been filed in the U.S. two and one-half years earlier. The "Background" section said that biotechnology had produced a lot of polypeptide and proteins which have drug action, but they could not be given by mouth because they get digested in the stomach. Even when the digestive enzymes are inhibited, there is still the problem of getting the proteins across the intestinal lining and into the blood.

     Several pages of graphs, figures and schematics illustrated how he used intestinal lymphocyte selectin "toe" molecules to give drug micro-particles a "toehold" in the intestinal lining, and to deliver them through a system of manholes and alleys called the Peyer’s Patch. He tricked the intestine into letting the protein-drug micro-particles through this lymphocyte crawl space. And the proteins got into the blood without being chopped up.

     So this was how he got his toxins into Cooper’s bloodstream without causing him diarrhea! His toxins slinked in through the Peyer’s Patch, guided by his intestinal selectins!

     The crown jewel of the patent was the delivery of insulin. He gave insulin in selectin-coated micro-particles to diabetic rats and showed that it got into the bloodstream and decreased their blood sugar. And he presented long lists of other proteins and peptide hormones that could be delivered, and long lists of protective coatings against stomach acid.

     His "Examples" section was a literal cookbook for whipping up these preparations. Just substitute "protein toxin" for "insulin" and it was a recipe for murder.

     But which protein toxin? The simple, quick and dirty method that I’d used on Ashton wouldn’t work on Ledbetter. How could I get into Ledbetter’s lab?

     As my excitement wore off, I came to an uncomfortable realization: It was just a theory. A super theory, but a theory just the same. You didn’t have to be a district attorney to know that we didn’t have probable cause for a legal search of Ledbetter’s lab. The Diogenes did his best to rock me to sleep, but it took a long time. So close, yet so far.

     The next evening, the Old Man practically had the sherry poured before I closed the door behind myself. A DHL International Courier Service envelope sat on top of his record machine, and no records were spinning. So he had just received his own copy of the patent. He brought up the subject immediately, speaking in our agreed-upon Pig Latin.

     "Ben, I have just read a scientific paper which is so exciting I can hardly put it down! It has opened ideas which I must pursue. But, you see, I am at a loss to do so because the range of possibilities is impossibly vast."

     "I hear you talking," I replied.

     "One must simply shorten the list. I, myself, am at a complete loss as to how to go about it," he lamented.

     We kicked this theme back and forth. Westley had received his own copy of the patent and liked the theory that Ledbetter poisoned Cooper by placing selectin-coated micro-capsules of protein toxins in his food. But he needed a short list of candidate toxins, like I’d given him for Ashton. I knew it would come to this. I tried to tell Dr. Westley I couldn’t get into Ledbetter’s lab.

     Margaret announced dinner. She was talkative, but we went through all three courses quite briskly. The Old Boy and I retired early to the study. As he switched on the light the tape recorder did not squeak to a start. My first thought was that it might have blown a fuse, but there was no tape on the reel. Westley gestured for me to sit in the comfortable chair while he continued to slowly pace around the room.

     "As if by cosmic coincidence, it would appear that we both have the same problem: the need to act."

     "I would guess so."

     "Unfortunately, Ben, my hands are tied, as you can well imagine."

     "Yes, Dr. Westley. But I am in the same situation. I have absolutely no access."

     "But you do have the advantage of working close to your subject . . . matter."

     "Yes, Dr. Westley. So close, yet so far away."

     Westley sat down in front of me, perched on the edge of his Pharaoh Chair. This brought us face to face, but he looked to the side, staring at the carpet.

     "Quite!" he said, glancing at me furtively. He began to wring his hands like at our first dinner interview. "If you could just be a fly on the wall, to quote the old proverb, that is."

     "I am too big for that. And I doubt that the subject would tolerate me buzzing around. As I was telling you, his research associate Dr. Chiu — "

     "Well, if one could not be a fly, one could be a moth. They are nocturnal." His voice crept up to a higher pitch, and he was fidgeting badly in the chair.

     "I am not a locksmith."

     Westley gasped at the bluntness of my statement. He sat back quickly, bumping one of the jackals with his elbow. It was several seconds before he collected himself.

     "But, Ben, you don’t really . . ." He let his words dangle.

     "That’s exactly what it comes down to."

     "Perhaps you could find some way to . . ." Again, he dangled his words. So I remained silent and let him dangle. "But, you are so clever, you could certainly find some way to . . . I would say . . . well . . . we are so near and, as you say, and yet so far."

     He had extracted a handkerchief from his pocket and wrung it in his hands. I stared at the oriental carpet for a long time, my eyes hypnotized by the arabesque.

     It reminded me of a scene from the World War II novel The Sea Chase by Andrew Geer. I read the book the summer I turned 14. The English destroyer captain had paid a tribe of Pacific Islanders to go out looking for the German freighter hiding somewhere in a group of islands. The freighter’s Kapitän Erlich spotted a canoe full of islanders and gave his helmsman orders to run them down. In answer to his crew’s silent condemnation of the murderous deed, the hard-bitten Erlich said that for a thousand years of history, it had been the same story: the British hiring others to do their dirty work for them.

     Quietly, Dr. Westley said, "Ben, one of my remaining friends on the County Commission has told me that the decision meeting on my ouster will be on the twenty-seventh of February. That is three short weeks. If we cannot come up with something concrete by then, I shall not be able to weather the storm."

     Westley, too, was staring at the carpet. So he was at the end of his tether. My anger quickly subsided into pity.

     "Okay, Dr. Westley, I’ll give it my best shot."

     "Oh, Ben, I am so truly grateful — "

     What a curious mixture of emotions I experienced, riding the elevator to the ground floor. So I would have to burglarize Ledbetter’s office. Should have known last August that I’d have to break the law to accomplish this mission. Just like I should have known last August that the project would take three times longer than I had estimated. Could I get all the information needed in a single evening? Could I even bring myself to try? And if I did get the information and they indict Ledbetter, would I be able to maintain sacred choirboy innocence? Would they kick me out of the graduate school? How could I keep Rebecca from finding out? I slept a troubled sleep.

     The next morning, I woke up a confirmed mercenary. A few months ago, I had signed up for this irregular duty just like the Pacific Islanders in the novel. I had taken the King’s Shilling and had accepted payments of a few paltry pounds. Now the King was expecting service. See it through, Ben, and hope you don’t get caught red-handed.

     It took the rest of the week to work out my plan. On Saturday morning I pocketed my checkbook and driver’s license and visited a couple of computer shops. I bought a tape backup unit and a selection of cables and adaptors. At least one of them would be compatible with Ledbetter’s computer. An office supply store sold me an executive hand-held tape recorder and a number of tapes. At a drugstore, I bought a cheap throwaway camera and five rolls of 36-exposure film. Lastly, I bought a length of three-pronged extension cord and an adaptor at a hardware store. All told, the equipment cost me a month’s salary. The gear barely fit into my locker at the library.

     Did the Old Man appreciate the enormity of the step I was taking? It could get me thrown out of graduate program and into jail. And it was immoral. On Monday evening I called the Old Boy at his residence.

     "Dr. Westley, about this coming Wednesday. I’m very sorry, but I can’t come to dinner. Things are getting very busy, and I am under pressure to collect some data — "

     "Yes, Ben, I quite understand."

     "Do you understand data collection, foul in the night?" After a long silence, Westley declared formally, "I understand that one must work the night through on some of these scientific projects — in order to gather data efficiently. I can only hope that you are successful and expeditious in your experiment. Godspeed." (Click)

     I went back to the Department and waited until everyone was gone. Standing on a chair that I took from McGregor’s lab, I probed around the false ceiling outside Ledbetter’s lab and found a satisfactory but inelegant solution to the entry problem. A quick check in the basement confirmed that Physical Plant had what I needed. D-Day would be Wednesday, two evenings later.

     I was nervous all day Tuesday and Wednesday. At 5:00 Wednesday afternoon I grabbed a sandwich and swung by the library to pick up my equipment. I had to reenter the building before six in the evening to avoid using my access card, which would generate a computerized record of my entry.

     I hung around the graduate student lounge, occasionally checking the hallways for activity. Why had everyone picked that night to work late in the lab? Activity dropped off sharply around 11:30, but I couldn’t start until everyone was gone. Sheng-Ping Chow was the last holdout, working in Al Kozinski’s lab, testing his damn herbal diuretic medicine, no doubt. Kozinski’s lab was inconveniently close to Ledbetter’s. I’d told Sheng-Ping so many times that when he got too tired to experiment, he should go home and watch TV to learn more English. Didn’t he ever get tired?

     Sheng-Ping finally left around 2:00 in the morning. Physical Plant still had the two aluminum stepladders. With shaking hands, I placed one ladder next to the Revco liquid nitrogen freezer that stood in the hallway outside Ledbetter’s lab. I climbed up the ladder and opened the false ceiling, revealing a large gap in the three-inch cinder block wall, made to accommodate water pipes. Reaching through, I opened the false ceiling in Ledbetter’s lab. In such narrow quarters, manhandling the second ladder up and over into the lab was a difficult operation.

     I returned to McGregor’s lab, picked up my equipment and stashed it in the false ceiling over the hallway. Just as I started to crawl through the gap into Ledbetter’s lab, I received the shock of my life: Footsteps coming up the hall. I quickly dangled a coil of coaxial cable into the hallway below.

     "Working late tonight, boss?" the voice asked. It was a soft French Creole accented voice. What a relief! Only the Haitian janitor.

     "Yeah, laying cable. Got to get the data transferred," I shouted down through the hole. The janitor made his rounds along the opposite side of the hall, opening doors, dumping wastebaskets and doing cursory sweeping. What would I say when he opened Ledbetter’s lab and found it dark with the other ladder standing under a hole in the ceiling? He approached. A chill went down my spine as he opened Ledbetter’s door with his pass key and flipped on the lights.

     "You going be working in here, too, Doc?" he shouted up at me through the hole in Ledbetter’s ceiling.

     "Yes," I said. Through the hole, I watched him empty the lab wastebasket, open Ledbetter’s office and empty the wastebasket there. I pulled my head back into the shadows as he turned around.

     "Then I leave lights on and doors open for you, Doc."

     "Thanks," I said, making as if preoccupied with my cable-laying. After he had moved on, I climbed down the ladder on the hallway side and walked into Ledbetter’s lab through the open door. I moved the tape unit into place, replaced both ceiling panels, and stowed both ladders neatly against the wall near McGregor’s lab. Returning to Ledbetter’s lab, I closed the door, pushing the button in the knob to lock myself in.

     My heart was still racing as I checked the back side of Ledbetter’s computer. Luckily my cables matched his I/O ports. I booted up his computer, looked at the directory of executive programs and then typed in the commands to dump his hard disk into my tape drive. Loading one tape would take about 30 minutes.

     While his machine was talking to my machine, I cleaned up the ceiling crumbs from his floor and lab bench. Next, I took inventory of loose-leaf binders holding the carbon copies of his notebooks. They were neatly organized by date, but the last two years were missing. The original notebooks were kept in the locked file cabinets, but I found the keys stashed inside a pewter German beer mug embossed ‘Hansestadt Hamburg.’ It’s funny how you notice such trivia when your heart is fluttering, your head’s swimming and your body is in a cold sweat.

     I opened the cabinet and read the dates, titles and tables of contents of the notebooks into my hand-held tape recorder, rattling off names of proteins, drugs, coatings and code numbers like a tobacco auctioneer. By the time the hard disk transfer was completed, I had read one year’s worth of books into the voice tape.

     But Ledbetter had 30-some diskettes on the shelf. So I put a new tape in my drive and played the diskettes into my machine, one by one, running back and forth between the computer and the notebooks. I hadn’t worked so hard since the day I had first hauled out the Diogenes and went into a frenzy, hosing it down and scraping away barnacles, trying to remove all the nasty critters before they dried and hardened. This time it was a race against dawn.

     Around 4:00 I finished with the computer. I unplugged my gear, packed it into a black garbage bag, rushed it down the hall to McGregor’s lab and stashed it under my section of bench.

     Then I verified that one of the keys opened Ledbetter’s Revco freezer in the hallway. I would not enter it tonight because the containers would frost up faster than I could read them. Camera in hand, I stepped once more into Ledbetter’s lab and locked myself in. The most dangerous point was past. If someone caught me now, I could pocket my tape recorder and camera and say I was looking for a bottle of methanol. I photographed Ledbetter’s bookshelves and took a shot of the notebooks lying sideways in the file cabinet. I photographed the keys on a piece of millimeter graph paper, together with some lab paraphernalia as camouflage for the drugstore film-processing guy. For backup, I made impressions of the keys using aluminum foil.

     The household refrigerator inside the lab contained too many bottles and vials to catalogue. But hanging on its side, calender style, were several pages: "Contents of refrigerator, freezer and Revco freezer." I breathed a sigh of relief and sequentially photographed the pages, holding them up with a pencil so my hand wouldn’t show.

     I went back to the file cabinets and found Ledbetter’s "Received" and "Sent Out" files. There were simply too many formulations to recite into the tape recorder. He had been receiving a lot of medicinal biologicals, like insulin, human growth hormones and prolactin. But I didn’t find any toxins.

     His right-hand desk drawer contained correspondence with Cooper and University administrators, scientific manuscripts and files of his patents. One contained the complete text of the European application that I had ordered from the WPS. None of them showed any evidence of toxins. I photographed the drawer at a 45-degree angle to reveal all the file headings and then took some camouflage shots around the lab.

     I looked at my watch and gasped: It was 5:45! Some of the Chinese grad students might be coming in soon. I picked up all my remaining stuff, carefully locked the cabinets and desk and replaced the keys in the pewter mug. Double check. Triple check. Everything was left like I found it.

     Just one thing left to satisfy my curiosity. I stepped on a chair and looked through the false ceiling of Ledbetter’s office. Just as I’d feared: Solid cinder block all the way. I never would have made it if the janitor hadn’t let me in.

     I turned off the lights, locked Ledbetter’s lab and stashed my camera and tape recorder in the garbage bag in McGregor’s lab. I tied it up with a special knot that would reveal if anyone entered it.

     I cleaned the ceiling tile crumbs off the Revco refrigerator in the hall and returned the ladders to Physical Plant. Mission completed, I staggered to graduate student lounge, flopped down on the couch and fell asleep just as the sky was lighting up.

     Maria Mendez woke me up at a 9:45.

     "Ben, I am sorry to bother you, but we have Molecular Genetics in fifteen minutes."

     "Thanks, Maria," I yawned.

     "Also, I should tell you that Dave Franklin has been going around making jokes about you. He says that your girlfriend kicked you out of her apartment."

     "No, it was nothing like that, Maria. I was working late, and we had some miscommunication. It wasn’t practical to go back to the boat."

     After class, I had brunch at the hamburger joint. Returning to McGregor’s lab, I found the knot in my garbage bag intact. As I started to walk out with the bag in my arms, McGregor eyeballed it and shook his head.

     "Candidi, you’d better watch out."

     "What?"

     "Or you’re going to turn into a bag lady!" he exclaimed with a rumbling laugh.

     "Right. I need a place to keep my gear," I replied nervously.

     "Yeah, you should get yourself a permanent lab."

     "Right. Well, just give me a couple of weeks to get our data analyzed, and then we’ll see if you will even accept me."

     You had to be blunt with McGregor every once in a while to keep him in his place. "I’ll be over at the library for the next couple of days."

     This turned out to be a serious underestimate.